Sport: Aweary of The Sun

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Trains are still the best conveyance for transporting a mood. Last week's destination was either the past or the future -- Chicago anyway, Wrigley Field. After two or three switchyards, a traveler gets turned around, and the sensation is of highballing one way and the other, backward and forward, in time.

The pity with which the old fedora-wearing baseball writers beheld their fresh replacements always seemed to have to do with missing trains. Seeing the country roll by in thatches of shadows, hearing Babe Ruth call all the redcaps "Stinkweed," were trivial elements of the coverage but critical parts of the experience. Without day baseball and night Pullmans, Red Smith could never have written, "Frisch's homer was the longest in history. Frankie talked about it all the way from St. Louis to Boston."

But railroad tracks don't sing anymore. Sinatra barely sings anymore. The new sleeping compartments are capsules resembling John Glenn's old accommodations on exhibit in the Air and Space Museum (without the air and space). And all the ball clubs have long since flown away. Wrigley Field fell in line with the age last week, when, 53 years after the innovator (Cincinnati) and 40 years since the procrastinator (Detroit), the Cubs finally put in lights. That makes everyone.

The Governor isn't often present for the throwing of the switch, but this was an unusual sunset. Even the buildings across the street wore bunting. A World Series supply of chroniclers from the American as well as the National League showed up to see the last-place Phillies oppose the fourth-place Cubs, whose proprietors said they had to give in to television and go incandescent or risk having to host every one of their postseason games in St. Louis. If any. The Cubs are 80 years between World Championships and pennantless since World War II.

Their longest-suffering fan, a hearty, hatchet-faced former tire dealer named Harry Grossman, 91, pushed the electric button. "Let there be light," he proclaimed in a biblical voice. The Cubs' holiest relics, Ernie Banks and Billy Williams, threw out first balls. Chicago's most sentimental pitcher, Rick Sutcliffe, took the mound. "It's like sunshine and Wrigley are saying goodbye to each other," he thought, though only eight night games are scheduled this season and just 18 a year for the calculable future. Looking hard at the Phillies' leadoff man, Phil Bradley, and straight into a light show of Instamatic flashes, Sutcliffe was struck by history -- and Bradley.

A home run right off the bat: the perfect note played on a party horn. Then the bottom of the inning kept on that way, fast and farfetched. Mitch Webster singled and Ryne Sandberg was up. Out of the rightfield stands popped Morganna, the floppy exhibitionist with the unmissable kisser, racing for the batter's box on mincing old-ballplayer feet that brought back the newsreels. She couldn't make it past the security guards to Sandberg, but she got to him anyway. His giggling homer gave Chicago a 2-1 lead.